Lawrence Block - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

He tapped on the watch. The crystal was still clouded.

He wondered if the Seikos clouded up. Probably not. Those beauties were sterling silver, emblazoned with the police department logo, and inscribed with the officer’s name on the back. They were given to officers after twenty-five years of service, presented in a satin-lined case by the chief at a ten-minute ceremony that the wives and children could attend.

A.J. reached down and picked up a half-eaten Hershey’s bar off the console and broke off a square of chocolate.

The department had stopped giving out the watches last November. Said they couldn’t afford it anymore, what with all the recent pay increases, EEOC-mandated promotions, lawsuits on excessive force, worker’s-comp injuries, and the high cost of computers, radar guns, patrol cars, tin badges, and gasoline.

A.J.’s twenty-fifth anniversary was next month. He had mentioned that to Andy a few days ago, and Andy had asked why he didn’t just buy a watch and have it inscribed to himself.

Don’t ya think it loses just a little meaning that way, kid?

He looked back at Andy, hitting the wipers again to clear his view.

Suddenly Andy leaned over the railing and lost the rest of his country-fried steak dinner into the river. He coughed a few times, drew himself tall, and with trembling hands used a neatly folded handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe his mouth.

A.J. peered up at the sky. It was still raining, the drops floating from the sky like Lorraine’s love dust, but not hard enough, he guessed, to drive the kid back inside the cruiser. He’d let him stay out there awhile.

In the pale glow of the lone streetlight, A.J. studied Andy’s slender face. It looked ghostly and pained, and A.J. knew the ghostly part came from what lay under the bridge. But the pained part, well, that was something else.

It was embarrassment, something A.J. understood. No one wanted to lose their cookies in front of a senior officer. It was pretty damn undignified to puke all over your crisp blue trousers and your just-out-of-the-box Rockports.

A.J.’s eyes drifted along the empty bridge. Maybe there was something that happened to men when they stood on bridges, like standing in the middle of a bridge put them halfway in-between something good or bad. Or weak or strong. Or between yesterday and tomorrow.

He had stood on a bridge once. A high-arcing overpass near the airport. It had been his assigned post back in — when was it? — nineteen eighty-seven? Eighty-eight?

The ice had started dripping from the sky about nine A.M. By nine-thirty, two cars had slid off the overpass into the snowy banks below.

A.J. had been sent to the bridge to monitor traffic, slow speeders, and call ambulances for idiots who still thought they could race their way across a high patch of ice fifty feet in the air.

He had a ride-along passenger that day, some woman from a neighborhood-watch committee who the chief thought needed a tour of duty in order to gain a greater awareness of how hard the police were working on community relations.

It would have been a fine day, normally, with the ice storm a perfect setting to allow an epic display of police compassion. Except for the fact that A.J. had a touch of the flu that had settled in his intestines and he knew the moment he stopped the cruiser next to the overpass guardrail that it was going to be a long morning.

The stomach cramps started around ten, and by noon he was covered in a suit of ice, his fingers so frozen he could barely key the radio to ask to be briefly relieved.

The request was denied. Three times. He was needed, they said. There was no one else.

So he had toughed it out. Four hours, standing on the side of the overpass, waving his flashlight at the foggy, slow-moving headlights, his body shivering uncontrollably, shoes frozen to the road, and watery, burning shit running down the back of his legs.

The neighborhood-watch woman never asked what the smell in the cruiser was. But there was a look of disgust in her eyes as they made their way back to the precinct, like she thought he was some sort of animal who was too lazy or too uncivilized to use the toilet like decent human beings do.

The easy chatter of the radio pulled him back to the moment. Andy was still bent over the concrete wall, head in his hands. A.J. thought about going to him, but decided not to. He’d come back when he was ready.

The car was growing cold. A.J. reached over to flip up the heat. The fan rattled and the vent puffed out lukewarm air.

He was tapping on the vent when out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of a folded paper on the passenger floorboard. He picked it up, and in the dim light he unfolded it. It was Andy’s paycheck stub.

A.J. knew how much money Andy made. Because of the union, starting salaries were common knowledge, and were even posted on the department’s Web site. But still, A.J. wanted to look.

Thirty-two thousand, one hundred and seventy-four dollars and three cents. Awful lot of money for a rookie who didn’t know shit about what he was doing, or why.

His gaze moved to the deductions.

A hundred-buck automatic deposit to the First Bank of Tennessee. Union dues. Federal taxes. Social security. 401k contributions. Payroll-deducted equipment costs. The kid had bought himself a Kevlar vest.

A.J. looked to the dashboard, at the picture Andy had clipped there earlier tonight. The photo was of Andy’s wife and baby. The woman, a wide-eyed beauty, looked a lot younger than Andy did, and the baby was so new it was still wrinkled.

He folded the check stub and set it on the seat. Thirty-two thousand was nowhere near enough.

A.J. made decent money now, decent enough, he guessed, for a single guy long past child support. But in the early years, when Lorraine was young and raising Sheila and trying to make a home for them, it had been a struggle. Later, after he lost track of Sheila, he had started sticking almost a third of his paycheck into a savings account. He had found a nice little cabin on Lake Arkabutla down in Mississippi and he wanted to buy it.

Eight grand into the plan, he met Spider Jackson, a trash-talking street germ with a big attitude and a bigger father who wielded one of the sharpest legal swords in the city and who had other political attachments, like the mayor’s sister.

Spider had been caught red-handed selling stolen guns and, as all dirtbags do when they’re high and scared, he resisted arrest. Bit a chunk of flesh out of one officer’s hand, kneed another in the groin, and sliced open the abdomen of a third before he found himself in the back of the patrol car, alive but hurting.

A.J. never hit Spider. Didn’t get there in time to do anything except drive him to the jail and escort him inside. All the way in, Spider was hollering how his daddy was going to sue everyone, but A.J. had heard it all before, and hadn’t given it another thought until a few weeks later when his name showed up on a subpoena in a brutality lawsuit.

The car was too warm now. A.J. reached down and turned off the heat and used his sleeve to rub the condensation off the glass so he could keep an eye on Andy.

In the old days, people sued the city. Nowadays, they could sue officers, and that’s what Spider’s father did. In the end, the city settled their part of the lawsuit, and the jury divided the balance of the settlement up among the officers.

Later, the lawyer explained that since all the officers denied any culpability, the jury had no reason to believe that A.J. was the only one who was really innocent, and besides, he said, you know better than anyone that to some people you’re all just white faces in blue uniforms.

The court took the eight thousand in one lump sum, and set up a payment plan for the rest. His final payment was due in August of this year.